xAI Lab Members

Randy Goebel
Principal Investigator
rgoebel (at) ualberta.ca

R.G. (Randy) Goebel is currently professor of Computing Science in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Associate Vice President (Research) and Associate Vice President (Academic), and Fellow and co-founder of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII). He received the B.Sc. (Computer Science), M.Sc. (Computing Science), and Ph.D. (Computer Science) from the Universities of Regina, Alberta, and British Columbia, respectively.

Professor Goebel's theoretical work on abduction, hypothetical reasoning and belief revision is internationally well know, and his recent research is focused on the formalization of visualization and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). He has worked on optimization, algorithm complexity, systems biology, and natural language processing, including applications in legal reasoning and medical informatics.

Randy has previously held faculty appointments at the University of Waterloo, University of Tokyo, Multimedia University (Kuala Lumpur), Hokkaido University (Sapporo), visiting researcher engagements at National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo), DFKI (Germany), and NICTA (now Data61, Australia); is actively involved in collaborative research projects in Canada, Japan, China, and Germany.

Osmar Zaiane
Principal Investigator
zaiane (at) ualberta.ca

Osmar R. Zaiane is a researcher, computer scientist, professor at the University of Alberta specializing in data mining and machine learning

Greg Kondrak
Principal Investigator
gkondrak (at) ualberta.ca

My area of research is Natural Language Processing (NLP), or, more broadly, Computational Linguistics.

Andreas HOLZINGER
Colloborator
andreas.holzinger (at) medunigraz.at

Andreas Holzinger is lead of the Human-Centered AI Lab (Holzinger Group) at the Medical University Graz and since 2016 he is Visiting Professor for machine learning in health informatics at Vienna University of Technology. Andreas was Visiting Professor for Machine Learning & Knowledge Extraction in Verona; the RWTH Aachen, University College London and Middlesex University London. He serves as consultant for the Canadian, US, UK, Swiss, French, Italian and Dutch governments, for the German Excellence Initiative, and as national expert in the European Commission. He is in the advisory board of the Artificial Intelligence Strategy “AI Made in Germany 2030” of the German Federal Government and in the advisory board of the “Artificial Intelligence Mission Austria 2030”. Andreas Holzinger promotes a synergistic approach to Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence (HC-AI) and has pioneered in interactive machine learning (iML) with the human-in-the-loop. Andreas’ goal is to augment human intelligence with artificial intelligence to help to solve problems in health informatics. Andreas obtained a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Graz University in 1998 and his second Ph.D. in Computer Science from TU Graz in 2003. He serves as Austrian Representative for AI in IFIP TC 12, he is organizer of the IFIP Cross-Domain Conference “Machine Learning & Knowledge Extraction (CD-MAKE)” and is member of IFIP WG 12.9 Computational Intelligence, the ACM, IEEE, GI, the Austrian Computer Science and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). More information: https://www.aholzinger.at

Firas Lethaus
firas.lethaus (at) gmail.com

Firas Lethaus is the Director of Machine Learning for the Volkswagen Group, and works in the largest global Volkswagen Group IT Lab, the Data:Lab Munich, where he also heads the Deep Learning Expert Center. Firas has a background in machine learning and development of autonomous driving systems in the Volkswagen Group, including in the automated driving division of Audi. He is responsible for the development of strategic and practical applications of AI within the Volkswagen Group, and is currently developing the case for and role of explainable AI (XAI) in the whole group.
R. Goebel, F. Lethaus (2020). “At the frontier of AI applications: balancing technology push and application pull,” invited plenary talk on Frontiers in AI, European Conference on AI (ECAI 2020), Santiago de Compostela, Spain, Sept. 3, 2020.[online]

Juliano Rabelo
Postdoc
robelo (at) ualberta.ca

Juliano Rabelo has a bachelor degree in Computing Science, a Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence with a focus on Question Answering and a Doctorate degree on Text Classification (all degrees from UFPE/Brazil). Juliano founded and worked at a research-focused company for 10 years, and now he is a postdoc researcher at the xAI Lab. Being passionate about languages and how they are applied in different scenarios, Juliano's current research focus is on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Explainable AI applied to text.

Mi-Young Kim
Postdoc
miyoung2 (at) ualberta.ca

I have been researching with Prof. Randy Goebel's group since 2009, as a postdoc and research associate. Currently, I'm an assistant professor in Augustana campus, University of Alberta. My research interests are in natural language processing, machine learning, and text analytics. Currently, I'm studying information extraction from legal and medical data.

Nawshad Farruque
PhD Student
nawshad (at) ualberta.ca

Nawshad is currently a PhD student at the Dept. of Computing Science, UofA, conducting research on Extraction and Modelling of Major Depressive Disorder from Human Language by employing Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Algorithms. Before that he pursued his Master's degree from the University of Lethbridge, in Distributed Spatial Query Processing and Optimization. Nawshad has extensive experience in developing enterprise softwares through years of experience in software industry. He is originally from Bangladesh.

Housam Babiker
PhD Student
khalifab (at) ualberta.ca

Housam is currently a PhD student at the Dept. of Computing Science, UofA, working on machine learning interptability and explainability

Shahin Atakishiyev
PhD Student
shahin.atakishiyev (at) ualberta.ca

Shahin Atakishiyev is from Mirzabayli village of Gabala, Azerbaijan. He received a BSc Computer Engineering degree from Qafqaz University, Azerbaijan in June 2015, and an MSc Computer Engineering degree with a specialization in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems from the University of Alberta, Canada in January 2018. Since September 2019, he is a PhD student in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, working at the Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) lab under the supervision of Prof. Randy Goebel. Shahin’s research interests include Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, and Decision Theory.

Education

PhD in Computing Science, University of Alberta. 2019-2024
MSc in Computer Engineering, University of Alberta. 2016-2018
BSc in Computer Engineering, Qafqaz University. 2010-2015

Talat Syed
Machine Learning Scientist
talat (at) amii.ca

Talat is a Product Lead for the Advanced Technology stream at Amii and a Machine Learning Scientist. His role is to guide industrial partners in various stages of their AI adoption, translating world-leading AI research to industries. As part of the applied team, Talat help clients reach their goals by helping them incorporate machine learning and leverage its potential to add business value to their organization. He is enthusiastic about finding the right solutions for various business problems and passionate about bringing applications closer to research. Talat has around 10 years of industry experience with a focus on AI-based software product solutions. He has worked with multiple industrial partners in various sectors including technology, telecommunication, health, and oil & gas. Prior to Amii, he has worked for some of the largest telecom and electronic health and medical record companies in the world. Talat received my Master's in Computing Science from the University of Alberta and currently is associated with the XAI and Chatbot labs. He has also published research papers in machine learning and have patents related to phonetic modelling and compression techniques. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and an Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), and have also earned certifications for Product Owner and Scrum Master.